LOLz

Wow. I found this picture on engrish.com - it's a website that has a bunch of different things like this that have been mistranslated in other countries. Yeah.

Aaaanyway, I was in Augusta yesterday at Barnes & Noble and I really wanted to go to the graphic novel section. I stared at the shelf longingly from afar even. But then my friend who was with me pulled me away. :(

So, I finished reading Understanding Comics. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about it. It definitely made me apply a lot of concepts to comics that I really hadn't thought of before, like when he talks about iconography and the implications behind "cartooning" vs. "realism". And I thought the historic elements he talked about were really interesting, as well as the differences between eastern and western comics - again, I was aware of the cultural differences he talked about, like the eastern emphasis on the cycles of nature and balance, but I had never thought to relate that to comics. I'd like to read more about that, actually.

On the other hand...a lot of what McCloud was saying didn't seem to get him anywhere. It felt like he was presenting these topics in order to come to some greater conclusion, but in the end I didn't think he really accomplished that, and I lost sight of what his message exactly was. Even when he was trying to defend his position on his definition of comics, he ends up contradicting himself - "Our attempts to define comics are an on-going process which won't end anytime soon. A new generation will no doubt reject whatever this one finally decides to accept and try once more to re-invent comics. And so they should." So, he's saying that even though he thinks his definition should be "reinvented,” he's still going to explain it anyway. It just seems a little less than productive, I guess. Like, maybe he just wants to talk and needs an excuse. But, like I said,
he did make me think more broadly about comics, even though people who aren't as new to comics probably didn't glean that much from it.